Firm of stone masons, marble masons, statuaries and sculptors about which more research is needed. The Mapping Sculpture website credits the foundation of the firm with John James Sanders and suggests a probable identification with the J.J. Sanders listed in Ingrid Roscoe’s dictionary (which derives its account almost entirely from its predecessor dictionary by Rupert Gunnis). Roscoe, in turn, suggests that her J.J. Sanders might be ‘the “Sanders of Fitzroy Square, London” who produced a large number of tablets’. Assuming these identifications to be correct, this gives the firm a period of activity stretching from 1812, the year the two dictionaries state that J.J. Sanders carried out repairs to St John, Westminster, to the opening years of the twentieth century, the period of the firm’s last known commission, the Memorial to Princess Caroline Murat (d.1902), outside All Saints Church, Ringsfield, Suffolk, which, according to Bettley and Pevsner, is signed ‘Sanders of London’. Roscoe lists 31 signed funerary monuments, the earliest the monument to Thomas Dampier (d.1812) at Eton College, the latest that to Alleyne and Marianne Barker at Rickmansworth, which dates from 1888 or after and is signed ‘Sanders, Euston Road’. Given its period of activity, it seems likely that the firm was founded by the man Gunnis describes as ‘J. Sanders, a mason’, whom he states was J.J. Sanders’s father; it certainly could not have been the Mapping Sculpture website’s John James Sanders, who was 60 at the time of the 1861 census (and therefore was born c.1801). Following John James Sanders’s death in 1867, the firm was continued by his son, Charles Sanders. Although Charles’s date of death is not known, his birth in c.1825 renders it improbable that he would have still been active by c.1902, the period of the Murat monument, suggesting that there was a fourth, as yet unidentified, generation.
Gunnis had a poor opinion of the firm’s output, adjudging it ‘dull and uninteresting’. One commission did, however, merit some favourable comment – and an engraving – in the Illustrated London News of 26 September 1846; this was the Memorial to John Lydekker, designed by the architect William Tite and installed in the lobby of Lloyd’s Rooms in his Royal Exchange building, London, the paper describing it as ‘a neat marble Memorial’ with ‘some cleverly-executed foliage (it is now in the Museum of London). By the end of its period of activity, the firm was sub-contracting, or buying in, some of its pieces, as is evidenced by the beautifully carved Angel of the Last Judgement, which towers over the two rather mediocre kneeling angels in the firm’s Murat memorial and which Philip Ward-Jackson has suggested is probably Italian work.
Ancestry website: (i) 1841 England Census for John Sanders. Middlesex. St Pancras. Tottenham. District 9; (ii) 1851 England Census for Charles Sanders. Middlesex. St Pancras. Tottenham Court. District 13; (iii) 1861 England Census for John J. Sanders. Middlesex. St Pancras. Tottenham Court. District 8; (iv) London, England, Church of England Deaths and Burials, 1813–2003, for John James Sanders. Kensington and Chelsea. All Souls, Kensal Green.
Bibliography: J. Bettley and N. Pevsner, Suffolk: East, New Haven and London, (2015), 2018, p. 473; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. xix, 242–43; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1850, London, [1968], p. 339; Illustrated London News, 26 September 1846, p. 208; Mapping Sculpture; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 242–43.
Terry Cavanagh, May 2025